The Voyager 1 interplanetary spacecraft was launched in 1977 and has now reached interstellar space, where the most man-made traveling object is farthest. He has significantly exceeded his original mission and continues to return valuable scientific data, but there is an obvious mistake that leaves his controllers puzzled. It has a built-in position control system that keeps the ship’s antennas pointed at the Earth, and although apparently still working (since we’re still in touch with the probe) and other systems are fine, it has started returning incomprehensible data. Apparently he has developed a habit of reading random data or stating that the antenna cannot be in it.
The fact that the 45-year-old computer is still working is proof of the skills of its designers, and at a distance of 14.5 billion miles repair is impossible, no matter how fascinated we are to know about the failure modes of old electronics in space. It is assumed that they can simply live with the error if the system is still running, issue a software patch or find some way to use one of the ship’s redundant systems to avoid the problem. In the meantime, we can rest easy in our beds, because we are still a few centuries away from his return as a giant alien sensitive machine.
We have presented the Voyager program several times before here in Hackaday, not least when we took a closer look at one of its tools.
thanks [Jon Woodcock] for the top.
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